01 October 2008

You know the number of times I have seen a hyped up article about how hulu is the savior of telly on the internet, blah blah cattle fodder nonsense, it's the You Tube Killer, yakkity yak.

North American centric much?

Hulu might be the pro-DRM network manager's idea of new media bliss but it's not The Answer.

It is The Answer when talking about majority of net users in the United States of America ... maybe Canada, if it is indeed accessible in the shores North of the US.

But, in somewhat typical US centric manner, when people in US talk about Hulu being groundbreaking, the large segment of internet-savvy folk of the rest of the world population is not included in this equation.

Do they even exist in their eyes?

There is an alternate choice to Hulu in the form of Joost. I've heard a few folk here in Netherlands talk about it and had a few good reviews for it.

What these two discourage is file sharing / uploading by users. Instead the material seems to be provided by networks.

Whilst Youtube has had some questionable moves (recent spate of taking down videos), one of the novelties of the service is the ability to share videos with millions of others. Some of them might be user made material, others might be a clip of something crazy that happened on telly and one that most of us missed.

Maybe that is the point. Powers that be worry about sharing of information; they would rather we watched what they wanted us to watch?

Wouldn't it be ironic if an Asian nation like China launched a video sharing service that becomes more popular than any of these apps AND the Asian service is nto finnicky about region specific access. Just saying.